Google Photos Export to a New Android Phone, Dates Intact
How to put a Google Takeout export on an Android phone so the gallery sorts by the real date, where in DCIM to put files, and what breaks.
You copied the photos from your Takeout onto your new phone. Open the gallery and every picture from the last ten years is dated today, in one endless block. Scrolling back in time does nothing because there is no back in time.
Android sorts by a date stored in the file. Takeout took that date out of most of the files. Put it back and the gallery fixes itself.
How the Android gallery orders photos
Android keeps a media database. When a new file appears, the media scanner reads the EXIF DateTimeOriginal for images and the container date for videos and stores it as "date taken". Gallery apps, including Google Photos on the phone, sort by that field. If the tag is missing, the scanner uses the file's modified time.
Copying over USB with MTP often sets the modified time to the copy time. Copying over Wi-Fi or from a cloud drive does the same. So every photo without an EXIF date, which after Takeout is a lot of them, lands on the day you copied it.
There is no way to fix this on the phone itself for thousands of files. It has to be done on the computer before the copy.
Step 1: Write the dates into the files
Unzip the Takeout parts into one folder. Then merge the .json sidecar data into the photos. With exiftool:
exiftool -r -d %s -tagsfromfile "%d/%F.supplemental-metadata.json" \
"-DateTimeOriginal<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp" "-FileModifyDate<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp" \
-ext jpg -ext heic -ext png -overwrite_original .And for videos, which use different tags:
exiftool -r -d %s -tagsfromfile "%d/%F.supplemental-metadata.json" \
"-CreateDate<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp" "-FileModifyDate<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp" \
-ext mp4 -ext mov -overwrite_original .The truncated and (1) sidecar names need extra handling; the exiftool guide covers them, and free scripts like GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper automate it.
Step 2: Think about HEIC and Live Photos
If your Takeout came from an iPhone, many photos are HEIC. Recent Android phones display HEIC, but not all gallery apps or sharing targets do. Converting to JPG before the copy avoids surprises. Keep the metadata when converting; a plain converter throws it away. See HEIC to JPG from Takeout.
iPhone Live Photos arrive as a still plus a short MP4. On Android those are two files. You can keep both, keep only the stills, or merge each pair into a single Motion Photo, which is the format Google and Samsung phones use for their own moving pictures. Google Photos on the phone plays Motion Photos. See Takeout Live Photos as MP4 and MOV pairs.
Step 3: Put them in the right folder
Android looks for camera photos in DCIM/Camera. Files there show up in every gallery and in Google Photos' camera backup. Other folders under DCIM or Pictures also appear in the gallery, usually as separate albums named after the folder. Subfolders inside DCIM/Camera are fine and are a good way to keep a year and month structure without dumping 40,000 files into one directory.
Do not put photos in Android/data or Download. Some gallery apps skip those.
Step 4: Copy
Connect the phone by USB and choose "File transfer" on the phone. It appears as a drive in Finder (with Android File Transfer or similar on a Mac), Explorer or your Linux file manager. Drag the folder into DCIM. A 50 GB library takes an hour or so over USB. Wi-Fi transfer apps work but are slower.
Once the copy finishes, unplug, and give the phone a few minutes. The media scanner indexes new files in the background. Open the gallery and scroll back. Photos should fall on their real dates.
Or let the app do steps 1 to 4
Takeout JSON Metadata Fixer does all of this in one run on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Select the Takeout zips as the source and the connected phone as the destination. The app writes the real date and GPS into each photo and video, converts HEIC to JPG if you ask, handles Live Photos the way you choose, and writes the output into DCIM on the phone, sorted into the folders you pick. It knows the newer supplemental-metadata sidecar names and the truncated ones, so nothing is skipped silently.
Exporting straight to a phone is part of the paid version, a one-time $9.99. Everything else, including fixing the dates into a folder that you then copy yourself, is free for the first 500 photos. The app never uploads anything; the phone is treated as a local drive.
What about Google Photos backup on the new phone?
If Google Photos is set to back up the camera folder, everything you copy into DCIM/Camera gets uploaded to your Google account again. That may be what you want, or the opposite of it. Turn off backup before copying if you are leaving Google. If you are moving between two Google accounts, this is a legitimate route: fix the dates, copy to the phone, let the new account back it up with dates intact.
Frequently asked questions
The gallery still shows today's date for some photos. Why?
Those files had no sidecar and no EXIF date, so the only date left is the file date, which the copy reset. Common for Live Photo clips and old chat images. You can set dates for that batch with exiftool before copying.
Can I copy directly to an SD card instead?
Yes, and it is faster than MTP. Put the card in a reader, copy the organized tree into DCIM on the card, then put the card in the phone. The app can write to the card directly.
Will the phone show locations?
Gallery apps read EXIF GPS, so photos that had real coordinates in the sidecar show a place once merged. Photos with Google's 0.0, 0.0 placeholder have no location and stay blank.
Do file names matter on Android?
No. The gallery sorts by date taken. Readable names such as 2019-07-14-1105.jpg help when you browse the folder from a computer, and they avoid clashes between two files named IMG_0001.JPG from different phones.